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I’ve worked with a lot of leaders over the past several years who find themselves trapped on the gerbil wheel of too much to do and not enough time to do it. There are a lot of reasons for that. Corporate restructurings and 24/7 access through smartphones are two of the big ones.

Another is the tendency for high-achieving managers and executives to assume without any question at all that everything they and their teams do has to be 100 percent perfect. While the intentions are good, I’d argue that always going for perfection is a fairly mindless approach. In the real world, there is not enough time and there aren’t enough resources for everything to be optimized at a 100 percent level.

The question, of course, is which things need to be perfect and which are the ones where good enough is good enough? Just asking that question is a step in the right direction. If you’re starting this week feeling overworked and overwhelmed, I encourage you to ask it as you review the to-do list for you and your team. If you want to take the process further, check out the other “perfect versus good enough” questions I raised in a post a few years ago.

They might just lead to you and your team feeling a little less overworked and overwhelmed.

Executive coach Scott Eblin’s goal is to help you succeed at the next level of leadership. Throughout the week, he’ll offer his take on the leadership lessons in the news and his advice on your most pressing leadership questions. A former government executive, Scott is a graduate of Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government and is the author of The Next Level: What Insiders Know About Executive Success.

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